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Comment by markisus | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why the Kinect is still so popular given the many more recent projects that have come to market, eg Realsense, Zed, Orbec.

I’ve recently been using the Realsense for robotics and they are satisfactory (although they have been drastically increasing in price for unclear reasons). I wouldn’t use Kinect because they are no longer being officially manufactured.

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I went to a CeX recently and they have a bunch of Xbox 360 Kinects laying around for 8 euros. Even my hometown which doesn't have a lot of tech stores, has Xbox 360 Kinects laying around at some mall shops for pretty cheap. I can go out and buy one today for cheaper than a meal out, and make use of the wide software made for it by the Kinect community, and I know exactly what to expect in terms of its capabilities. Same can't be said for any of the other sensors, which are also low enough volume that if they get discontinued you'll probably have an even harder time sourcing them than a 360 Kinect discontinued 10 years ago

Because of volume, it was very widely available, it was pretty cheap too on the second hand market.

Xbox 360's were The Original Netflix Machine of that 2008-2012 range. Sure maybe Wii's sold more but they only effectively played Wii Sports and didn't support Full HD. Sure PS3's had blu-ray drives in them but people were beginning to stop caring about physical media. The most popular "game" in terms of hours played on the 360 was the Netflix App.

So because of that, I'm not surprised that casual audience also got a Kinect at some point too. Because of the Netflix app, you always had your 360 plugged into your TV.

Our problem is support for the products. If you are deploying these you are probably in the same boat where you only do about 200-300 a year and since you are small potatoes you get no support. Though we are not looking to move back to Kinect for the same reason we are looking to get off these sensors to some thing that can be supported.

I still have a kinect, but I haven't used it in years, I have started looking at some of the stuff I used it for, and now, I would just use what's in an iPhone pro. Since the 12, the main camera has LiDAR, and apples SDKs can handle everything the Kinect used to do and more.

probably price? They are generally in 5x to 10x price range. You can buy tons of kinect with price of one of those.

I think you may be right. I just looked up Kinect on eBay and you can get one for twenty bucks.

Price, drivers and/or recognizability? There's a reason that the usually technically inferior Raspberry PI still probably outsells all the bananas,etc.

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